A Night of Serious Drinking

[IdleRich]

Best books and films about booze... in fact boozing

To get you started...

Books - Under the Volcano, Hangover Square

Film - The Lost Weekend, On The Beach

Honorary mention to the Russian film Leviathan which, while not about drinking as such, featured so much vodka being thrown back I felt ill.

All things that make you feel in an alcoholic haze, the terrible blurry clarity, the wired tiredness, the boozey soggy horror.

Incidentally I'm very qualified to judge this after a week of constant brutal alcoholic abuse. If I wrote something now it would no doubt fit perfectly.

 

[version]

It's not just about boozing, but Cassavetes' Husbands is very boozy. That scene near the start where they go from leading songs round the table to harassing some poor woman to stumbling around in the bathroom whilst Falk chucks up his guts.

 

[version]

Withnail & I

 

[WashYourHands]

Le Cercle Rouge’s Yves Montand has fun dt’s, if you haven’t seen the end it all makes sense

 

[WashYourHands]

Fun = giant land crabs

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

The other St Petersburg by John Nicolson (1994)

It was written by the elder brother of a drinking buddy in college, and in it recounts the escapades of various Soviet-era hard drinkers in and around Leningrad/StP. There was a practice of arriving at a friend's apartment, ringing the bell and then quickly downing and then concealing a bottle of vodka. Your host would open the door to a stone cold sober visitor who would soon become inexplicably intoxicated on the journey from front door to kitchen table. Always stuck with me, that.

The other St Petersburg is not a guide. The purpose of a guide is to orient the reader and show him or her the way – to the Hermitage, for instance – whereas my purpose is to disorient, to get you thoroughly lost and confused before leaving you to find your own way out again.

This small book is a detour into the intimate, cramped spaces of the physical city and the cramped, but suddenly expansive spaces of the Petersburger’s mind. Our crooked path is strewn with exasperating zamorochki, gracious podarki (unexpected gifts from providence or fate), encounters with the city’s history and literature… and is shaped by the perpetual quest for the perfect hangover. There are digressions on the beauty of the city’s architecture (just a trick of the light?), the superiority of Soviet portwine to Portuguese port, and on how Malevich painted his Black Square. Last but not least, I have included a translation of Daniil Kharms’ fascinating 1939 novella The Old Woman, a work which cuts straight to the quick of St Petersburg’s most distinctive characteristic – this city’s troubled, but fascinating relation with reality.

 

[IdleRich]

Reminds me to mention Moscow to the End of the Line (it has various titles, but that's the name on the copy I read). Man gets on a train and drinks a lot and talks about Russian literature, but mainly drinks. Then dies I think.

 

[jenks]

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg - young guy has to escort older writer to an important event. Older writer is an absolute pisshead. Fantastic book about a weekend long bender made even better by the fact that it is a thinly veiled account of Schulberg’s youthful encounter with the dissolute Fitzgerald

 

[jenks]

Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring and Tom Sardis’ The Thirsty Muse deal with the hard drinking/alcoholic American writers of the early twentieth century.

 

[IdleRich]

Checked the details of the Moscow to the End of the Line

Eventually Venichka oversleeps, misses his station, and wakes up on the train headed back for Moscow. Still drunk, half-conscious and tormented by fantastic visions, he wanders aimlessly the night city streets, happens upon a gang of thugs, and is promptly chased and murdered by them

 

[IdleRich]

I remember finding it unusual when there is a first person narrator and he has to describe his own death.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Checked the details of the Moscow to the End of the Line

Reminds me of this

 

[WashYourHands]

 

[WashYourHands]

Some div collected all the drink scenes with random awful music, Wake in Fright demands no additional bs

 

[WashYourHands]

 

[WashYourHands]

 

[IdleRich]

"I go out on Friday night... and I go home on Monday morning"

But I love Alan Silitoe. Remember reading all his stuff while living in the streets where it was based.

Should have mentioned Wake In Fright given how often we discuss it.

Naked has the same feel... but not so much actual drinking as I remember.

 

[WashYourHands]

have a soft spot for Yves M is LCR for the way his character forsakes alcohol for one key part where the robbery sequence is concluding (no spoilers)

had a couple of destruction dt moments I mean who do you trust who hasn’t, coming round, seeing beetles, “things” writhing and wriggling, weird halos over inanimate objects giving everything a slightly stained glass/religious hue to reality and LCR captures its waking intensities well. makes me slightly queasy even now countless drinks later, watching some clips def hits a thirst button somewhere

Mean Streets which is a bit shit tbh at least tries re steaming drunk sequence where the camera must be in some kind of chest harness pointing diagonally up, repeated in a raft of subsequent films

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah that became THE way of filming someone fucked up. Strange if that was ultimately the main legacy of garlanded classic Mean Streets.

The Red Circle, I remember enjoying but... details... maybe I was drunk.

 

[WashYourHands]